(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s rare for a movie to really leave a mark on your heart and soul.
Most movies, while thoroughly enjoyable and well worth your cinematic or streaming time, glance off you, never to be heavily thought of again; they have their moment, sometimes a very good one, and then it passes.
And then there are those films which burrow deep down into your heart and soul; they don’t simply leave a mark, they crater you, wreck you, and leave you thinking about them over and over and over again.
Such a film is Gia Coppola’s extraordinary emotionally arresting film, The Last Showgirl, written by Kate Gersten based on her play Body of Work, a hushed and quiet film that dwells in the shadows and the underwrought places of nuance but which leaves you reeling with the force of the emotional energy it contains and flawlessly conveys.
The Last Showgirl centres on an ageing dancer, Shelley Gardner (Pamela Anderson who gives a revelatory performance), a 57-year-old showgirl of longstanding who is the star of the last traditional Las Vegas review, Razzle Dazzle, which itself is based, as Shelley reminds anyone who will listen on the Parisian tradition of lido theatre.
Shelley has been dancing in the review since the late 1980s, and far from being just a paycheque to her, the show, which is facing cancellation by the host casino’s new owners who prefer shows of a more x-rated variety, is the absolute beginning and ending of everything.
Having failed to set the dancing world alight, and estranged from her daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd) who resents how her mother prioritised performing in the show over tucking her into bed at night – Shelley tearfully counters that she did her best to look after her daughter when she couldn’t afford childcare and angrily rejects a counter observation by her ex and show manager Eddie (David Bautista) that she couldn’t just given up the gig and got an ordinary job – the show is Shelley’s one sign that she had made something of her life.
Without the show, which is definitely cancelled fairly earlier on in the film, Shelley is rudderless, without money to live on, but more than all that, without any sense of purpose or achievement.
She is so desperate to hold onto what the show means, that when two younger performers, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), with whom she is close shrug it off, their main concern getting another gig as quickly as possible, argue that Razzle Dazzle closing isn’t the end of the world, Shelley variously argues, cries or breaks down.
The show is her LIFE, and without it, a great many other things in her life can be called into question and it’s clear that Shelley, softly spoken and often self-effacing to a fault, doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to handle that kind of uncomfortable exploration.
Told as a series of interconnected scenes, which reflects the staged nature of its source material, The Last Showgirl is a gently paced narrative that has plenty of ruminative moments where Shelley is standing outside the casino where she works or on the infamous Strip itself, agony and sadness writ large on her lined and lived face.
Fare from slowing things down, these reflective scenes are core to the telling of the story of The Last Showgirl which is filled to the brim with existential angst which cannot be indulged because there are more pressing issues at hand like paying the bills, but which also cannot be ignored because every day, especially those counting down to the closeure of Razzle Dazzle, reminds Shelley that the one thing that has kept her aloft, has kept her believing her life has meaning, is about to be sacrificed, without care or shame, on the altar of history.
Try as she might to figure out where to go next or what to do, and Shelley does go to an audition at one point which comes with its own profound emotional reckoning, she can’t get past the fact that with the show no longer as her anchor, that the very point of her life is being called into question.
The power of The Last Showgirl rests in its quietly and thoughtfully heartrending embrace of the salient truth that the great epic moments in life, the ones that challenge, exhaust, terrify and defien yourself often occur in seemingly small, unremarkable slivers of day-to-day life.
While we barely notice one day slipping into the other, for Shelley each day that passes is one day closer to the end of nearly four decades of structured existence and it’s in and on thoe days that Shelley begins to make her peace, however haltingly, with the end of the world as she knows it.
One relationship that shows how far Shelley progresses and grows over the course of the film is the one with her daughter who goes from haltingly awkward to cautiously interactive to angry and then embracing, mirrored by Shelley who is waksy gleefully happy to see her daughter but whose voicemails to Hannah reflect someone who moves from desperate to unsure to acceptingly philosophical.
There’s no great rengagement of mother and daughter and the end of the film is more wish fulfilment than actuality, but as The power of The Last Showgirl moves into its final act, it becomes clear that however imperfectly that Shelley is some sort of accommodation with the new unwelcome landscape of her life.
As the film ends, Shelley, her close friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis in arresting form) who left the show years earlier and who has struggled to remake her life since, along with Eddie and Jodie and Mary-Anne, but most particularly Shelley, face a whole new world of towering challenges and scant possibilities and we are with them every step of the gently soul excoriating and deeply moving way, each of us asked what happens to any of us when the bedrock of our life disappears almost overnight and we have to face the fact that perhaps the life we thought we had is not the one we have at all.
Check out this great interview with Pamela Anderson on The View …